This Town Hall recorded on March 13, 2020 addresses current market events and how to navigate the emotions of COVID-19 to maintain stability. Jonathan Satovsky and our team also respond to client questions and concerns.
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Hello, Welcome to Satovsky Asset Management Town Hall meeting. Our first attempt at a video conference in order to give some education and information about what’s happening in the state of the world: health, financial and the like.
We appreciate everyone joining us.
This will be recorded for those that aren’t able to participate, and most importantly, I just want to use the opening moments to say our hearts and minds go out to everyone to be healthy and safe during this challenging moment in time. Whether it’s a day, a week, a month, six months, whatever happens to be in isolation and time that you have with your family to stay healthy.
As a culture and a firm I want to reassure everyone that we actually had to do business continuation planning and succession during Hurricane Sandy, so our business and operations have been functioning smoothly; nobody was in the office on Monday we actually had it scheduled in advance not knowing this event was going to happen. With everybody working remotely we’re able to log into all our systems, all of our operations from business partners and the like are all functioning fine and smooth and communication lines are open for us to communicate as a team as well as to be able to be of service to those that we’re fortunate to serve.
We’ll get through this together!
I’ll jump right in; we have it scheduled for an hour but we’ll leave some time at the end if people have questions on anything that I share, you’re welcome to inject questions. There is some that came in previously but there’s a chat function on your zoom screen to direct your inquiries. We may not be able to get to all of them, but certainly we will do our best to address any specific questions on anything that’s top of mind for people, or that comes up as we go through our prepared presentation.
So, interestingly, I was preparing this presentation a couple weeks ago at a moment in time before I knew this virus outbreak was happening, and I was thinking about the cultural diversity of America and the Statue of Liberty struck to mind.
There’s a plaque on the bottom with an Emma Lazarus poem that says something to the effect of, “give me your tired poor hungry yearning to breathe free and let me be the light upon your golden door.” I don’t know why that struck me but you know at this moment – the diversity of everyone yearning to be able to have freedom and health.
Okay, so with that I’m going to hop right in. These are some disclosures as normal, nothing that we have put together here is specific advice; everyone’s situation is different; there’s a lot of data and information; past performance is no guarantee of the future. As you know, there’s a whole lot of other disclosure that for legal and compliance purposes we have to put forth.
I want to start with a quote, I like quotes. Why do you need clothes and motivation? Well, you don’t need a bath every day either but it certainly helps, so in times like this an excerpt from the poem by Kipling really struck me: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.”
For those that are interested in seeing the whole poem it was quite profound, I’m sure you can look it up on your own but it struck me that at this moment in time for anyone that’s on the call, that has family or friends that run businesses, keeping your head cool while everyone’s losing theirs is a critical component of being able to have a healthy mindset for yourself and all the people that are in your life.
Quickly into the facts, this was the fastest bear market ever. In 19 days the market up until March 11th had declined – a bear market being measured as a 20% decline from the last crisis in 2008-2009 – we did have a several 19% declines but no 20% decline both in 2011 and late 2018, but this officially broke through the 20% marker that measures a bear market.
We’re in a weird anomaly, a lot of people were rooting for the end of the bull market in order to be able to move forward. Everyone was on pins and needles waiting for an excuse for things to drop, so, we can create all sorts of excuses for why this happened so quickly, so fast, but it did and you can see visually how quickly and how sharply things have fallen in a period of 19 days.
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